Strong message on Ukraine from a blog reader

 

 

 By David O. (NYC)

Just want to relay how much I appreciate and rely on reading “Organizing Notes.” Especially enjoyed your thoughts in the post, October 16, 2022, entitled: Seasons Change and So Did I. Your call for clear-headed analysis and incisive expression in this crucial moment we find ourselves in — challenging us to get beyond facile peace activism — got me thinking.

As someone who had the opportunity to do anti-war broadcasting on WBAI/Pacifica radio in NYC during the American invasion/full-bore occupation of Iraq, I must say it is shocking to witness — right, left and center — such callous insensitivity and inhumanity towards the major victim of western aggression today: Russia.

In contrast to the USA’s manifest criminal military adventurism of the past, the current conflict in Ukraine is treated as if it does not impose an immediate burden of moral culpability on America. Seemingly relieved — free to blame Russia for the war in Ukraine — it is evident that the present obsession with pointing the finger at Russia for this conflagration is rooted in a childish psychic need to believe that we, in the west, are not the bad guy. Many Americans — willfully incurious of the historical record, oblivious to the geo-strategic forces at work, quite happy to feel righteous and upstanding — have triumphantly glommed onto the notion that Russia is the great evil in the world today.

To claim that this is Putin’s war or Russia is the aggressor or Russia invaded Ukraine — or assert that Russia is the perpetrator of unprovoked war or contend that Russian imperialism is driving this conflict — is to ignore the train of lies, broken agreements and subterfuge effected by the West, to shut one’s eyes to the ground truth and, most appallingly, to bolster the very enterprise that lies at the core of this conflict: out-and-out slaughter of the Russian-speaking people of eastern Ukraine.

In fact, an 8+ years long campaign of ethno-fascist state terror waged by a US-backed junta regime targeting the ethnic Russian population of eastern Ukraine — tormenting, persecuting and inflicting mass-murder — has devastated the people of the region and absolutely foreclosed any possibility for the Russian-speaking people of the Donbass (and adjacent regions) to ever re-join the Ukrainian state. How easy it is to disregard the Russian experience and perspective if one never listens to testimony from the people subjected to constant terror, endless shelling and the bloodbaths that come to pass day after day… untold human suffering inflicted by the authorities in Kiev, fully funded by the West.  

 

This US/UK/EU/NATO orchestrated campaign of ethnic cleansing and mass expulsion — a campaign that was sure to finally force Russia to engage, militarily, in a defensive action — is now being waged to draw Russia further into an interminable conflict in which the western powers hope to so de-stabilize the Russian state so as to precipitate its demise, fragmentation and geo-strategic looting.   

It is clear that vacuous calls for peace and a negotiated settlement will not be enough to bring public pressure to bear on the policy-makers in charge. However, if the concerned, peace-loving people of the United States and Europe were to rally behind a call for full international recognition of the liberated territories of eastern Ukraine, re-united with the Russian motherland, as the only acceptable framework for peaceful resolution of this conflict, perhaps public opinion could play a decisive role in ending this war. Otherwise, a vindictive, mean-spirited mentality will hold sway and the criminal impunity enjoyed by the western architects of this war will ensure that either interminable hostilities or the unchecked practice of genocide in the region, perpetrated by Ukraine, will proceed apace.

If one wishes to assign guilt for such a horrific happening as this war in Ukraine today, if one insists on casting blame, then the collective West — both leadership and consenting populaces — must be held responsible for every drop of blood shed. It is our autocratic elites and disempowered people who have masterminded and tolerated this decades long march, step by step, to unchecked militarism… without missing a beat.

Thanks again for all your work.

 

Update: When I posted this article on my Fazebook page I got a message stating I was banned for the next 60 days on the social media platform. So much for freedom and democracy in the USA!